Rand Paul, ‘Political Libertarian’

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) walks from Senate Republican weekly policy luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., March 6, 2018. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)The Kentucky senator has been forced to compromise his non-interventionist principles once again. We shouldn’t hold that against him.

Rand Paul’s vote was needed to confirm Mike Pompeo as secretary of state, and his refusal to give it was making some Republicans and conservatives upset. “What’s wrong with Pompeo?” they asked. “He’s well-within the party mainstream, he’s competent, and he has the president’s blessing.” For Paul and his most fervent supporters, the answer had been that Pompeo was far too hawkish. But on Monday, the junior senator from Kentucky relented. “Rand Paul Caves” read one headline. “Rand Paul’s Pompeo switch pleases Trump, angers libertarian base” said another.

The focus, in other words, was squarely on Paul’s repeated failure to shift the Republican party’s foreign-policy orientation. And the statement his office issued explaining his change of heart seemed to offer proof that he’d gotten nothing but hot air for his trouble:

President Trump believes that Iraq was a mistake, that regime change has destabilized the region, and that we must end our involvement with Afghanistan. Having received assurances from President Trump and Director Pompeo that he agrees with the President on these important issues, I have decided to support his nomination to be our next Secretary of State.

It all had the feel of compromise and dissatisfaction, of a purely political decision. And for Paul, I think it was the right one. I agree with Paul’s project of calling the party to a less interventionist foreign policy. But doing so requires a very hard-headed acceptance of the limits of one senator’s power and of the political landscape.

The Republican party and the conservative movement have shown a capacity to tolerate and even be inspired by attention-getting “stands” on principle. They do so generously only so long as such stands are not seen as aiding the Democrats in their drive to obstruct the Trump administration.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Significantly, Trump seems to have the same qualified tolerance. He intuitively understands that some senators need to play tough with him, and he doesn’t take it too personally. He lets others maintain their brands, so long as they don’t do so at the expense of his own. “Rand Paul is a very special guy as far as I’m concerned,” he said when asked about the Pompeo fight. “He’s never let me down.”

Advertisement

The promises given to Paul don’t amount to much, but they do allow him to reconcile himself to Pompeo’s nomination while saving face. Paul can say he called the public’s and the White House’s attention back to Trump’s campaign promises and to the small but influential non-interventionist part of the president’s political base.

It’s about as much as you can ask of a senator who constitutes a one-man faction. And it’s as much as you can expect of a senator on foreign policy, when Congress has ceded so much foreign- and military-policy authority to the executive branch.

Advertisement

Ultimately, Paul is a “political libertarian” in a way that we haven’t seen before. His position in the Senate requires compromises that his father, Ron Paul, or other libertarian gadflies like Representative Justin Amash, have never had to make. Even in an age of intense polarization, the House is big enough to accommodate a few quixotic holdouts. The Senate just isn’t.

But a “political libertarian” is inevitably going to disappoint those of his supporters who want a politician to embody their beliefs in a way calculated not to change government policy and our political culture, but to perpetually and clearly condemn it.

Realists, libertarians, and non-interventionists can continue to question whether the compromises Paul is making are worth it. But that he has to make them should be beyond dispute by now. So far, his judgement seems just about right.

Recommended Articles

Most Popular

If, as I wrote last week here, Joe Biden may save the Democratic party from a horrible debacle at the polls next year, Beto O’Rourke may be doing the whole process a good turn now. Biden, despite his efforts to masquerade as the vanguard of what is now called progressivism, is politically sane and, if ...
Read More

A number of liberal bastions are daily being hammered — especially the elite university and Silicon Valley.
A Yale and a Stanford, or Facebook and Google, assume — for the most part rightly — that each is so loudly progressive that the public, federal and state regulators, and politicians would of ...
Read More

Over the weekend, my colleague Kevin Williamson wrote an outstanding piece illuminating the ideology and opportunism behind a Connecticut Supreme Court opinion holding that the manufacturer of the semi-automatic rifle used in the Sandy Hook shooting may be held liable for violating state unfair-trade-practices ...
Read More

Rickey I. Kanter pleaded guilty to one count of federal mail fraud for falsely representing that his company’s therapeutic shoe inserts were Medicare-approved and for billing Medicare on that basis. Both federal law and Wisconsin law bar a convicted felon from possessing a firearm.
On Friday, a Seventh ...
Read More

Last October, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias -- in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things -- a larger problem has gone mostly ...
Read More

Few things can more quickly remind you of the vast cultural divides -- even between middle-class and upper-middle-class -- than a juicy Ivy League admissions scandal. It's the talk of the coastal parenting class, and it barely penetrates the conversation down here in Tennessee -- except as a curiosity. “Aunt ...
Read More

The Chicago Fraternal Order of Police has requested that the Department of Justice open an investigation into Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx’s handling of the Jussie Smollett hate-crime-hoax case.
Foxx ultimately recused herself from the investigation, but only after asking Chicago Police ...
Read More

Somewhere in Texas, filed on the fly by a glossy-magazine correspondent, and totally not as a parody written by Jim Geraghty -- “It’s all about vision,” Beto O’Rourke tells me, standing tall upon the Texas prairie, or brush, or whatever this high hilltop area is supposed to be called. We’re watching the ...
Read More